Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong

by Macur, Juliet

  Ferrari’s office, in the basement of the doctor’s Bologna house, was a chaos of wires, tubes, bicycles and machines. Armstrong had heard about some of Ferrari’s clients, including Eddy Merckx’s son, Axel, and Max Sciandri, a Brit who had grown up in Italy and later denied seeing Ferrari. Both suddenly rode faster than ever, and Armstrong had asked them if they had a secret. Yes, they said.

  Ferrari, the tall, thin Italian with a receding hairline and avian features, had studied at the University of Ferrara under Francesco Conconi, a scientist considered the grandmaster of Italian sports medicine. Conconi, a former member of the International Olympic Committee’s antidoping commission, knew his way around EPO. The IOC had paid him handsomely for his research into developing a test for it. But he was double-dealing. Even as the IOC paid him to develop the test, he delivered EPO to Italian skiers and cyclists.

  Ferrari learned from Conconi. Now Armstrong wanted to be the hematocrit-rich Plato to Ferrari’s Socrates. After evaluating him, Ferrari praised Armstrong as “amazing, amazing, so amazing.” But he told him he could improve only if he followed his advice and his plan, never straying. “I will train you,” he said, “and together, we can do great things.”

  Ferrari charged Armstrong $10,000 for the consultation and commanded 10 percent of his salary. Even Armstrong, who guarded money as if he were as penniless as his poor mother said she once was, thought the deal was worth it for what he could earn later, and agreed to it.

  The doctor and rider had to keep their relationship secret because Ferrari was then under investigation by Italian authorities for sporting fraud and for doping his riders. He dealt in cash and wrote little down so that he would leave a minimal paper trail. Over time, though, Ferrari grew lax about his rules.

  On Armstrong’s happy drive back to Como, he talked nonstop about how his career would skyrocket with Ferrari’s training and doping help. (Ferrari, however, denies doping any of his riders.) All Buck wanted to talk about was the two-hour shopping trip she and Neal took while waiting for Ferrari to be done with Armstrong. In a kind of lonely melancholy, Neal saw that Armstrong felt no guilt. Neal felt that Armstrong had forgotten the trip they’d taken to see the family of Fabio Casartelli, Armstrong’s teammate on Motorola who had been killed during the 1995 Tour. Armstrong had held Casartelli’s infant son in his arms and had embraced his widow.

  During one stage of the Tour, Casartelli had crashed and hit his head on a cement block along the road. Testa, who had been overseeing the doping on the Motorola team, persuaded the forensic doctor in France not to conduct an autopsy because he said it was obvious how Casartelli had died.

  Armstrong would eventually say that the day Casartelli died is the day he learned what it meant to ride the Tour. “It’s not about the bike,” Armstrong said. “The Tour is not just a bike race, not at all. It is a test. It tests you physically, it tests you mentally, it even tests you morally. I understood that now. There were no shortcuts, I realized.”

  No shortcuts—unless you consider a secret deal with Europe’s most famous and infamous doping doctor a shortcut.

  From Austin, Armstrong talked for hours by phone with Ferrari. He took training tips and grilled the doctor relentlessly. Once a week, in the middle of the night, the fax machine in Neal’s office would come alive with Ferrari’s training and doping calendars: when to take EPO, human growth hormone or testosterone so as to avoid testing positive.

  Though much of the public thought Chris Carmichael was the coach solely responsible for preparing Armstrong, that relationship was just a cover. Not that Carmichael would admit it. In 2006, he told me he was Armstrong’s main coach, then more recently failed to return several of my phone calls and e-mails asking for comment.

  As for getting the drugs, Armstrong had different methods. He could coax teammates into buying them for him from pharmacies in Switzerland, or buy them there himself. The soigneur Hendershot could procure drugs from his black market sources. Whatever they had to do, however much they had to risk, the winning would make it all worthwhile.

  By 1995, Neal, Armstrong’s unofficial business manager, couldn’t handle Armstrong’s contracts alone. Companies wanted to produce Armstrong trading cards. Others wanted endorsements. Neal needed help. Keeping tabs on Armstrong was near impossible. That’s where Bill Stapleton came in.

  Stapleton, a former Olympic swimmer who had competed at the University of Texas, had a fledgling sports practice at the Austin law firm Brown McCarroll and he needed clients. He needed Armstrong.

  When Armstrong reached out in the spring of 1995, Stapleton promised he would shower him with personal attention. He offered a low commission rate: 15 percent of Armstrong’s marketing deals. Other agents, including the high-profile super-agent Leigh Steinberg, had asked for 20 percent.

  He took Armstrong out for beers to woo him.

  “You’ll be a big fish in a small pound,” Stapleton told him. “There will never be a time when your calls go unanswered. You will be what my world revolves around.”

  “You’ll be there for anything, whenever I need you?” Armstrong said.

  “Yes, for anything, all the time.”

  “For anything?”

  “Yes, absolutely anything.”

  That was exactly what Armstrong wanted to hear. He loved being the most important person in the room.

  Back home, Linda Armstrong’s third marriage was crumbling because her husband, John Walling, drank too much and was missing work, and Neal thought Armstrong should help his mother with money—a suggestion Armstrong refused.

  For some reason unknown to Neal, Armstrong grew increasingly angry at his mother, long his greatest ally, the creator and perpetuator of the fantastic myth that the cycling world had come to embrace. Now he wanted nothing to do with her.

  When Armstrong had bought his land in Austin in 1994 for about $240,000, he could have used his mother, a real estate agent, and spread some of the commission to her. But he didn’t. The mother-son relationship was so worrisome that Neal and Linda tried to convince him to see a sports psychologist and channel that anger into his riding. Again, Armstrong passed. This was an Armstrong that Neal didn’t know or like. He worried that Lance started every relationship thinking, “What can you do for me?”

  The year before, Linda Armstrong and Neal had flown to Minneapolis to seek Greg and Kathy LeMond’s advice on negotiating Lance’s contracts. At the kitchen table in the LeMonds’ lakeside estate, they also asked how to rein in the kid’s ego.

  “How do I get Lance to be less self-centered and actually care about other people during all this?” Linda asked.

  The LeMonds didn’t know what to say. For a few awkward seconds, they sat speechless. Did they hear her right? Was Linda Armstrong telling them her son had no empathy? That he was out of control? They believed she was genuinely scared. They stuck to business advice—keep a close watch on him, don’t let him stray, carefully choose his partners.

  Two years after the Gewiss team swept Flèche Wallonne and basically announced to the world that its riders were doping—and doing so under Ferrari’s watch as the team doctor—Armstrong took the top spot on that podium, the first American to win the famed spring race. That year, 1996, he also won the Tour duPont for the second year in a row. He was the runner-up at Paris-Nice, a one-week race, and his skills as a sprinter and time-trial rider were improving. All that was left to be considered a Tour contender was to boost his performance as a climber.

  But as the summer of 1996 progressed, Armstrong could feel himself slow down. He dropped out of the Tour de France after just five days because of a sore throat and bronchitis. He told reporters, “I couldn’t breathe.”

  Neal also hadn’t been feeling like himself. Soon, the reason became clear: Neal had cancer. He was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare cancer of the plasma cells that inhibits the production of healthy blood cells. It hit Armstrong like a sinkhole in his path. Doctors gave Neal only two years to live.

  Still, an exhaus
ted Neal went to the 1996 Atlanta Olympics with Armstrong. An electric pump fed chemotherapy drugs into his chest. He slept on the floor of the house Armstrong rented for the Games.

  “He needed it for privacy,” Neal said of the house. “He needed it for all the damn shots he was getting. You needed the privacy because the other players were not on the drug program. They were not getting shots. It looked like a pharmacy in the bedroom.”

  Neal watched as Hendershot showed up with a bag filled with vials of liquid, syringes and IV bags and tended to Armstrong as if he were the cancer patient. He saw Hendershot give Armstrong an IV before and after the races. Armstrong was already using testosterone, growth hormone and EPO, but Neal wasn’t sure what substances Armstrong had received at those Summer Games. Whether he took banned drugs at those Olympics, or to prepare for them, Armstrong won’t say. When asked about it, Hendershot can’t remember the specific substances he gave Armstrong for those Summer Games, but said, “I would be totally surprised if he wasn’t” using banned drugs.

  Hendershot told me that it was common to give riders different cocktails of steroids with EPO, and to give them aspirin or pharmaceutical-grade blood thinners to make sure their blood didn’t turn to sludge. But whatever Hendershot had given Armstrong at those Olympics, it produced no miracle rides. Armstrong finished 12th in the road race and 6th in the time trial, feeling inexplicably gassed as he struggled in each event.

  Armstrong ended the professional season ranked seventh in the world, enough to secure a lucrative contract with the highly regarded French team Cofidis for the following two years. His salary: $2.5 million. He had even negotiated to bring Hendershot onto the team as his personal soigneur, a privilege granted to only the most elite riders.

  By that time, Armstrong also had a stable of sponsors, including Nike, Giro, Oakley and Milton Bradley. His bank account overflowed. Stapleton said that Armstrong was a very wealthy young man who he estimated would make between $2 million and $3 million that year.

  It was time for Armstrong to grow up. He finally moved out of the apartment he had rented from Neal for seven years and headed for a bachelor pad commensurate with his paycheck. Armstrong built a Mediterranean-style, 4,950-square-foot house on Lake Austin, with a pool, hot tub, two boat slips and twenty-nine palm trees. Gone was his beloved $70,000 NSX, replaced by a much cooler stable of toys: a $100,000 Porsche 911, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a Jet Ski and a powerboat. He threw himself a lavish twenty-fifth birthday party in his new mansion. But something was wrong.

  He’d returned from Europe feeling weak, as if he had the flu. His headaches resisted even a handful of ibuprofen, and sometimes as many as three migraine pills. On his birthday, he blamed it on too many margaritas, but a few days later, he coughed up blood. His personal physician said it was likely that Armstrong’s sinuses were bleeding, from allergies.

  On October 2, 1996, about 1 p.m., Armstrong and Neal had lunch at their usual haunt, The Tavern in Austin. Afterward, they headed to a mall to find a pair of shoes for Neal. This time Armstrong complained about a pain in his stomach.

  “I’m having trouble walking,” Armstrong said, doubling over.

  Neal told Armstrong that the first doctor’s assessment of an allergy attack didn’t seem right. He warned Armstrong that it could be serious, that he shouldn’t wait to see another doctor. He called one for him. Armstrong was in that doctor’s office before 3 p.m., as Neal waited nervously back home.

  Doctors checked out Armstrong with an ultrasound, then a chest X ray, then gave him the bad news. “Well, this is a serious situation,” the doctor, Jim Reeves, said. “It looks like testicular cancer with a large metastasis to the lungs.”

  Between 5:30 and 5:45 p.m., Neal’s cell phone rang. It was Armstrong.

  “I have testicular cancer,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Armstrong was distraught, Neal shocked. Now both of them had cancer.

  Within days, doctors discovered that Armstrong’s cancer had spread to his abdomen and brain. By month’s end, he was admitted to the Indiana University Cancer Center in Indianapolis to have the tumors removed. His chance of surviving the cancer was less than 50 percent, according to his doctors.

  The news made everyone in the sport jittery. Ferrari was worried that the drugs he’d encouraged Armstrong to take had given him cancer, or had hastened its spread. Armstrong didn’t buy into that theory. If doping caused cancer, then many other riders would be dropping dead. All he would say is that he regretted taking growth hormone. “It’s bad. It probably caused the cancer to spread more quickly,” he told friends. He claims that he never took it again.

  Still, as Ferrari had, everyone wondered if Armstrong had dealt himself a fatal hand—especially Hendershot, who said he immediately thought, “What have I done?”

  All of the shots, all of the concoctions, the potions and the cleansers he had injected into Armstrong for three years and more must have had something to do with the cancer. “It doesn’t take a leap of faith,” the soigneur told me. “You have to be monumentally fooling yourself to think that it wasn’t a factor. It was certainly putting himself at greater risk.”

  Now Armstrong could die, and it terrified Hendershot that he might be forced to live with the burden of a young man’s death.

  “I didn’t feel guilty,” Hendershot says. “I felt complicit.”

  But everybody knew about Armstrong’s doping, Hendershot said. The riders. The team managers. The soigneurs. Those guys washing the bike wheels. They all knew. And no one stopped it, certainly not Hendershot.

  He and his wife did the only thing they could think of to make themselves feel better. They dumped his supply of drugs. They packed up their personal things. They left cycling. Hendershot never called Armstrong about the cancer. He never called him again, period.

  Hendershot simply disappeared.

  CHAPTER 6

  A year before Armstrong and the Motorola riders discussed plans to use EPO, two years before Armstrong’s cancer was diagnosed, Frankie Andreu met a fresh-faced brunette at Buddy’s pizzeria in their hometown of Dearborn, Michigan. It was 1994. She was twenty-seven and sold water filters while preparing to open an Italian coffee shop. He was the same age and just back from the spring cycling season in Europe.

  A quick survey of Andreu’s physique—he was 6 feet 3 inches and 165 pounds, with about 4 percent body fat—made the brunette, Betsy Kramar, pause.

  “Um, why are your arms so skinny?” she said, pointing to his spindly biceps.

  He blushed. “Oh, I’m a professional cyclist.”

  “A what? So, that’s your job, riding a bike? I didn’t know people could do that for a living.”

  He was handsome, with golden brown hair, green eyes and a sexy smile. She was smitten, even though they seemed to have little in common.

  She had graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in theater. He’d only taken a few courses at a community college while pursuing his cycling career. She was outgoing, with a cutting sense of humor. He was more serious. Both were headstrong and opinionated (Andreu’s nickname in cycling was Ajax, for his abrasive mien). Each had a parent who had fled Communism—Andreu’s father left Cuba, Kramar’s left the former Yugoslavia.

  Early on, Kramar realized Andreu fulfilled her three criteria for a husband. Catholic? Check. Conservative? Check. Pro-life? Check. She had grilled him on those subjects the night they met. Her inquisition might have scared off other men, but Andreu was attracted to her confidence and straight-shooting nature.

  Soon, Kramar was pulled into cycling. Andreu brought her to races and introduced her to his friends. She learned that Andreu had always been a domestique—a rider who works to help the team leader win—and that Andreu’s team leader was a kid named Lance Armstrong.

  She met Armstrong at a race in Philadelphia, and thought he was just another cyclist. But he was already an American star in the sport, for whatever that was worth in 1994. Greg LeMond was then in the final yea
r of his great career, and cycling’s popularity in the United States had waned.

  Other than through LeMond’s success in the Tour de France, Americans knew about professional cycling mainly through a 1979 movie, Breaking Away. In it, a recent high school graduate falls in love with the sport and becomes obsessed with the Italian national cycling team, shaving his legs because he’s heard that’s what Italian riders do and adopting an Italian accent.

  When Kramar and Armstrong had been introduced, she treated him the way she treated everyone else—as an opponent in a debate. She argued with him about his agnosticism, trying to convince him that belief in God is the core to a person’s happiness.

  “You can’t control everything in your life, you know,” she said, “because that’s what God’s for.”

  “Betsy, that’s bullshit, I control my own fate,” he told her.

  After religion, they argued politics. Though he could be charming for a Democrat, she found him cocky and self-centered. When she visited Andreu in Como, they often would go out to eat pizza. Once, she made risotto at Armstrong’s lakeside apartment and he pitched in. He called her a wonderful cook, and he asked for recipes and ingredients. Though she knew he was being nice just so she would cook for him again, she fell for the flattery anyway.

  In the summer of 1994, Armstrong loaned his new Volvo—which he was given for winning the 1993 world championship—to Andreu back in the States. “Betsy deserves to ride in a nice car,” he said, and Kramar was pleased. Sure, Armstrong was loud and obnoxious, full of himself and full of it most of the time. But it wasn’t like she was going to marry him.